El desayuno

Around Granada, the standard breakfast—or second breakfast at a cafe, between 10am and 11:30am— is a cafe con leche and toast. Why second breakfast? Because your first breakfast might only be a cafe con leche, and breakfast has to get you all the way to lunch, which is at 2pm or 3pm.*

Toast can usually be ordered a few different ways:

— wheat or white

— half or whole

— plain, or with grated tomato, or serrano ham, or tomato and cheese (in all cases most people add olive oil and salt); there’s also butter and jam, which is without a doubt a concession to tourists

* Most people including school kids have nothing going between 2pm and 4pm except lunch. Almost no one is running errands on their lunch hour hours because the only things open between 2pm and 5:30pm are places serving food, major supermarkets, corner convenience stores, and “chinos.” What is a “chino” other than a rude conflation of a person and a thing? It’s a store run by Chinese stocking just about anything you might need that can be shipped on a container from China and sold, in most cases, for less than five euros (e.g. fishing line, posterboard, counterfeit Pokémon cards, spray paint, slippers, clothes drying racks, salad spinners, rag rugs woven with acrylic fabric, cheese graters that rust, and plug adapters that fail immediately).